Why the Cube Failed

Well, let’s get this part out of the way first. The folks over at the Cube-Zone (G4 Cube Forever!) will tell you the Cube didn’t fail, still has life in it, won x-many awards, and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, we can all agree that the Cube’s sales have been, shall we say, less […]

LEMMY: The Low End Mac Excursion Module

I teach Astronomy and Space Science. Wishing to teach students about the difficulties of manned vs. robotic exploration, it occurred to me that it would be nice if I could simulate a deep-space rover. The basic idea is simple: Use a radio controlled car to drive around a video camera, which will transmit live video […]

PowerBook 145b

2001 – When the word gets out that you want old Macs, people respond. A reader of this column recently donated several Macs to our school, including an old (1993) PowerBook 145b. Since my PowerBook 5300cs was stolen from a storeroom last fall, I have been ‘Bookless, and all computing has been restricted to home […]

Downgrading the OS: Newer Is Not Always Better

In my school and district, we are beset with the many problems associated with an aging fleet of Power Mac 5200s. The 5200, an all-in-one design, contains design flaws described elsewhere on Low End Mac. Suffice to say they are slow, crash a lot, and don’t do anything particularly well (although they are okay at […]

Create a Random Number Picker in AppleWorks

Occasionally a teacher discovers that they ask the same students to answer questions over and over because some students are more enthusiastic, while others are content to melt into the background. In order to bring more students into the discussion, I ask students at random – selected by a dice roll or by computer – […]

Starting a Presentation in AppleWorks

This short appendix is not a tutorial on how to make presentations on the computer, but rather how to get one started in AppleWorks 5. AppleWorks 5 has the ability to take almost any document and turn it into a full-screen, menu-less display, but the functions are hidden. There are also some built-in presentation templates […]

10 Uses for a Webcam in the Classroom

My first digital camera was a black and white QuickCam eyeball. The QuickCam was originally made by Connectix, but eventually the product was sold to Logitech. It has mostly survived the transition unscathed, and some models are still USB Mac compatible. However, the old style serial Mac version is no longer manufactured.

Digital Data Gathering

This is the first of a series of support articles I am writing for some district professional development meetings I am conducting in the Spring of 2001. I’m posting them as Mac Lab Reports because I believe others can benefit from what I have learned.

Mac vs. PC in the Science Lab

2001 – When you are finally able to obtain a computer, it may be that you are offered a chance to help make the purchasing decision; you may be forced to accept a computer you don’t really want – or you might be faced with accepting donations of PCs or Macs, because that’s all you […]

Computers in the Science Classroom

The reason this column is called Mac Lab Report is that these articles will chronicle the steps I took to go from a classroom with one computer to a classroom with 10 fully networked Power Macs in less than three years – at virtually no expense to our science department budget.